Edited to add supr quickly demonstrated my argument wrong. Still feel free to read it though (there's a puppy at the end).
Long/ranty/mathy, but come along for the ride if you've got a few.
TLDR at the end
First the math:
(1) V=IR (Voltage = Current X Resistance)
(2) Wattage = VI (Voltage X Current)
So as a result
(3) W=I^2R
(4) I = Square root(W/R)
So a couple of points:
The current is the description of the energy delivered to vaporize the ejuice, and thus the vapor production/vapor heat.
Wattage is a description of the electrical work performed by the battery. It is not the energy delivered by the device. That's the current.
Take equation (3). You run a VW device at a high wattage , but a very high resistance. That's could actually be a really low vapor production/ cool vape, because your current would be small. So your doing tons of electrical work (using battery life), but not producing much current, and therefore not producing much vapor, and relatively cool vapor.
Wattage is often used as a stand in for "coolness" of vapor or the vapor production, but that really isn't necessarily true. It's only true for a constant resistance.
As a way of describing your battery capability wattage is useful, as a way of describing your vaping experience, it has to be referenced with resistance, so when people talk about wattage they are really referencing current without knowing it (or at least without explicitly referencing it)
Why does this matter:
Lets say I'm running an RDA at 1.3 ohms and 14 watts and enjoying the vapor production/throat hit/temperature (in fact, I am). What I should be doing is identifying the current associated with those specs using equation (4). I should then be using the current I discovered works for me, and dropping the resistance significantly down towards the bottom of what my mod can handle. Then, using equation (3), I can input my current which I've determined I like, the lowest resistance (or near lowest, because as coils heat up their resistance drops) that my mod can handle, and get the wattage I want to set my VW mod to. It will be significantly lower than the 14 watts described above, because, I dropped the resistance as low as I safely could. Now I'm running my desired current at a lower wattage, so I'm producing the vapor that I want while draining my battery less, because as I mentioned above wattage just tells you how fast your're draining your battery (the work being performed). You're gaining nothing by running at higher resistance than the lowest resistance (or near lowest) your mod is capable of on a variable wattage device other than draining your battery faster.
A weakness in this analysis is that dropping the resistance would require a coil build that would vary from my current build (thinner coil inner diameter, larger gauge, less coils), but for the purposes of the post I'm assuming that people aren't intensely attached to the particulars of their coil build like gauge, inner diameter, and number of coils.
TLDR: Wattage tells us how much were sapping our battery. Current tells us how much energy we're delivering to our wicked coils, thus producing vapor. Why don't we as vapors talk more about the current we're vaping at? It's the energy delivered to our ejuice, and thus the vapor produced/vapor temp.
If you made it this far, here's a puppy for your troubles. Thoughts?
